Poliça's Channy Leaneagh, interview

Poliça are a quartet from Minneapolis who sound like the future. An elegantly tangled web of drums, liquid bass lines and ghostly synths, their electronic music comes into focus in the presence of their 31-year-old frontwoman Channy Leaneagh, the new Queen of Autotune. She may look like a beatnik pin-up – she has the composed sensuality of a young Jean Seberg – but when Leaneagh sings, her digitally altered vocals split and multiply, bursting into cascades of exquisite melancholy and brokenhearted defiance.

“These effects are sort of like taking drugs for your voice,” she says. “I’m not using Autotune to correct my voice, I’m using it to distort it, to catch the notes in between the melody line. I use the pedal [that creates the effects of Autotune – reverb, harmony and delay] to erase in my head all the ways it has been ingrained in me how to sing.”

Leaneagh’s musical background didn’t exactly suggest a taste for experimentalism. She played violin and danced ballet at a fine arts school, then married folk musician Alexei Caselle, with whom she formed roots ensemble Roma Di Luna. Impressed by her waifish presence and featherlight backing vocals, Minneapolis producer Ryan Olson invited Leaneagh to contribute to his 25-strong soft-rock collective Gayngs. It was while touring with Gayngs that she began to experiment with effects pedals. “It was a way for me to recreate myself in this new context,” she says. “I started to spend a lot of time just messing about with it at home while I was pregnant.”

Leaneagh became a mother in 2009 and Roma Di Luna’s 2010 album Then The Morning Came is full of songs of enchanted parenthood, but her marriage broke up shortly afterwards. “It was only after I had a baby that I started writing songs on my own, and that’s when doors seemed to open,” she says. “I was kind of lost before, I could never figure out what I was supposed to be doing in the world.”

She and Olson began collaborating, as Poliça, in 2011, with Leaneagh improvising over his backing tracks of computer-created beats. “It was a place I went to escape what was going on in my life. This new record is the sound of no expectations, I was just relieved to have a distraction from getting divorced. It all happened very quickly.”

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The other band members only joined for the final three recording sessions. “We were playing live before we had really even got to know each other,” says Leaneagh. Fellow autotune enthusiast Bon Iver hailed them “the best band I’ve ever heard”. Jay Z declared himself a fan. Then, earlier this year, Poliça became one of the most talked about bands at the influential SXSW festival in Texas. Next week, they release their second single, Dark Star, from their critically acclaimed album, Give You The Ghost.

Poliça’s debut may be the strangest break-up record you have ever heard, combining seductive sci-fi soundscapes with Leaneagh’s lamenting, distorted vocals. “The cadence and rhythm of words is important to me,” she says. “I like a lot of World music, where I don’t need to necessarily understand the lyrics to feel the emotion of the singing.”

The band really come into their own on stage, where Leaneagh gives physical form to the movement of the music.

“The easiest way for me to relax my voice is to move my body,” she says. “If your hips are moving your voice box is released, and I feel like I sing better if I’m not constricted. I’m not really a dancer but when I hear these songs, that’s all I want to do. I dance when we’re practising. I dance when we’re recording. Even if you can’t see me moving, I’m dancing in my head.”

Poliça’s new single, Dark Star, is out on Monday. Their debut album, Give You the Ghost, is out now.